A lot has been said and written about the conditions under which Foxconn workers construct the millions of iPads that are sold each quarter. But strip all that away, focus on the process itself, and what are you left with? Turns out it's a lot of painstaking detail, and far more hand assembly than you might have imagined.

Marketplace took a deep dive into the real Foxconn, not the one of Mike Daisey's fabulism, and what it found there was process. One filled with people making things at a time that we expect machines to.

That makes all the sense in the world, when you think about it; companies move outside the US for manufacturing when their human labor costs are high. A robot gets paid the same in California as it does in Shanghai. But the reminder that your iPad was handcrafted halfway around the world makes you appreciate it—and the people responsible—all the more. [Marketplace]